Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Anthony X. Marriage (essay date 1981)


Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Anthony X. Marriage (essay date 1981)

Anthony X. Marriage (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: “Whitman's ‘This Compost,’ Beaudelaire's ‘A Carrion’: Out of Decay Comes an Awful Beauty,” Walt Whitman Review, Vol. 27, No, 4, December, 1981, pp. 143-49.

[Below, Marriage compares Whitman's treatment of the theme of putrefaction with that of Charles Beaudelaire, concluding that “by dealing with the horror of the images of decay, these poets resurrect before man's eye the activity of life within death.”]

When I arrived in England I was appalled at the British attitude to death. To die seemed almost an act of indecency—if you have fallen so low as to die, then there were special people who would come, undertakers, to pack and wrap you up for the funeral …

Why is there this morbid attitude toward death? In a natural way one does not get rid of people through the back door! If death is nothing but defeat, the end of life, it is...

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